Articles

TRADING IN FREEDOM

by Steven Poole

The idea that everything is now subordinate to what "capital" wants to "see" is not merely an idée fixe of paranoid anti-globalization protestors, but stated clearly in public by those who minister officially to capital's desires. Back in the U.S., George W. Bush declared: "We need to reform our legal systems so the people, on the one hand, can get justice; on the other hand, the justice system doesn't affect the flows of capital." First a hasty sop to liberals --acknowledge that, sure, people should still be able to "get" justice, just as they pop down to the store to get a can of soda --and then the remarkable notion that justice, on the other hand, should never interfere with the operations of money. So justice is a sub-economy within the larger one (you can "get" justice), but it has no right to interfere with overarching systems of profit. Justice is subordinate to and dependent on capitalism, as is even "the strength of our families," according to (former) Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin.

     To argue, in the same fashion, that "freedom" was dependent on the oil business would sound like another conspiracy theory had it, too, not been officially stated. In May 2005, U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman celebrated the opening of an Azerbaijan pipeline that would carry crude from the Caspian Sea to the U.S. while avoiding Russia and Iran. Bodman said: "As Azerbaijan deepens its democratic and market reforms, this pipeline can help generate balanced economic growth, and provide a foundation for a prosperous and just society that advances the cause of freedom. "That is an awful lot for one pipeline to do: not content with carrying oil, it also provided the foundation for the advance of freedom. It was truly the little pipeline that could.

     The order of priorities in western "freedom" and "democracy" was again evident in the spiritually ascendant language of another Bush pronouncement: "In every region, free markets and free trade and free societies are proving their power to lift lives." It seemed the commercialists had finally got their way: markets were indeed acknowledged to be quasi-divine autonomous systems raising all to heaven. Why, then, if they were so free, could they not be left alone to function in their utopian way? Bush was not just compelled to tell Vladimir Putin how to change his country in order to clear a path for the march of free markets. The mollycoddling was necessary domestically as well: "It's important for the markets to see that we've got enough discipline in Washington D.C. to make hard decisions with the people's money," Bush said in 2004. This speech was reported the next day in The New York Times under the headline "Bush Says Social Security Plan Would Reassure Markets," as though "markets" were frightened children.

     How protean, indeed, these markets were. On the one hand, they dispensed God's justice, free from any interference by merely human justice; yet on the other hand, when the rhetorical occasion demanded, the markets were vulnerable little flowers, in desperate need of "reassurance." It is true that markets, being essentially consensual hallucinations, depend on confidence, but calls to "reassure" them on one point or another are often made for unstated ideological reasons, if not to disguise a simple motive of private profit. Similar kid gloves were apparent in former UK Trade Secretary Margaret Beckett's announcement that "Britain's businesses need to be able to trade throughout the world's markets as easily as they can in home markets without facing high tariffs, discriminatory regulations or unnecessarily burdensome procedures." Businesses may indeed want these things, but for Beckett to say they "needed" them, presumably in order to flourish maximally, was to endorse their wants without weighing them against the wants of others.

     After her trip to Latin America, Condolezza Rice had gone on to declare: "A region that trades in freedom benefits everyone." She did not mean, we can assume, trading in freedom like trading in textiles or precious metals: I will see you this much freedom for so many bananas. Celebrating the signing of the Central American Free Trade Agreement, Rice was invoking again the concept of "free trade," under the auspices of which, as British Chancellor Gordon Brown once explained, poor countries have "obligations" to "create the conditions for new investment."

     The freedom granted by "free trade" was not quite symmetrical. Among the "obligation" of poor countries under World Bank and International Monetary Fund deals have been, for example, the obligation to import food from the heavily subsidized U.S. and EU agricultural industries, thereby driving local producers out of business; the rich countries kept high tariffs on imports such as clothing and leather goods, thus preventing the poor countries from operating freely. Meanwhile, "creating the conditions for new investment" meant, for example, allowing western companies to take over indigenous public services and run them for profit. Water privatization in Manila and electricity privatization in India have resulted in price increases of up to 80 percent; in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, "profit-maximizing behaviour below the necessary levels, with the result that rural communities and the urban poor were further marginalized in terms of access to electric power and water supply. Ten of millions of pounds of the UK's aid budget were given to "privatization consultants" at big accountancy firms, the acceptance of whose advice was made a condition of aid to poor countries. To render the enlargement of such "free trade" more palatable to an increasingly informed and concerned public, the IMF, in a transparent coup of Unspeak, had simply changed the name of its "structural adjustment programs" to "poverty reduction and growth programmes." No one would be so churlish as to disagree that "poverty reduction" was a fine idea, yet there was no new evidence that the same old policy, thus relabelled, would actually achieve it.

Steven Poole currently writes for The Guardian and is the author of Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution. He lives in Paris, France.

     This is an excerpt from Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality.

     Unspeak © 2006 by Steven Poole and reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press. The book is available in Canada from Time Warner and in the UK by Little, Brown.